Final Project: First Pass

“Create a coherent interactive experience that involves the Arduino communicating with another device (computer, 2nd Arduino, MIDI instrument, etc.).
Interactive = listening, thinking, and speaking from both parties. Whether it involves one cycle or many, the exchange should be engaging.”

Such are the specifications for our final project in Physical Computing. Amanda, Rebecca, and I teamed up once again to create another interesting and engaging piece. We decided to make Fruit Hero: an interactive music experience with a  fruity twist. We’re going to make a musical instrument using grapes as the keys, and a program that shows the player musical notes to match.

That’s the idea. No, you can’t import grapes into Fritzing.

The materials:

• One Arduino Uno
• Nine Grapes
• One Speaker
• Nine 1.5 Mohm Resistors (These are huge!)

Before getting our hands on grapes, we wanted to prototype with buttons to make sure our notes were going to be played correctly. Easy enough, we’ve worked with buttons before. Except that we all forgot how to use buttons on a board. So that took some getting used to, as well as some issues with the organization of button prongs. But eventually we got four buttons onto the board. But then the speaker didn’t work for some reason. After some tweaking, we got this small version working.

Then we wired another breadboard with four more buttons. We ran into some issues with this. Only one side was working. We rewired a few times to no avail. We couldn't figure out why only some of the buttons were working, and the other weren’t. So we disconnected one and it was working again, but of course with only four buttons. But what was the issue? Turns out, the small ground wire we were using to connect the board together was just a bit too short, so the other breadboard wasn’t being grounded. Oops. We switched out the wires and all nine buttons (we added in two modifier buttons for changes in octaves) were working splendidly.

Next step: Grapes.